If It Looks Too Good To Be True...

I need to correct a fundemental error in yesterday's post on the changes to EverQuest II's Kael Drakkel server so, rather than bury it as an edit no-one would ever read, I thought I might as well give it a very brief post of its own. Also, since I logged in and played there for a while this morning and have a couple of observations to make, I might as well throw those in, too. Still going to keep it very short, though. No-one's that interested; me included.

Firstly, the correction: Kael Drakkel is not going to be a free-to-play server after all. 

Well... it is, kind of, but only for three weeks. 

This goes back to the confusion over dates I alluded to when I said "The changes are somewhat mysteriously scheduled to occur "Between April 6 and April 25", although it's stressed that they are permanent once implemented". I was taking my information from the Producer's Letter, which says

 "Between April 6 and April 25, we will be kicking off these permanent changes above by making the Kael Drakkel server available to all players—even those without membership"

I thought that was a clear statement that the server would be permanently available to everyone, members and free players alike, but no, that's not how it works at all. As today's announcement clearly explains,

"Anyone can play on Kael Drakkel. No subscription required until April 26!" 

I can see now how the statement in the Producer's Letter can be parsed to read as "Between April 6 and April 25 we will be making the Kael Drakkel server available to all players - even those without membership - as a time-limited opportunity to try out the changes, which will be permanent for members" but to my mind the phrase "kicking off" doesn't really express the meaning "temporarily introducing" at all clearly, although I do admit - and indeed did observe - that the sentence as a whole doesn't make much sense without such an interpretation. 

I just took it to be a badly-written sentence. Which it is, although not for the reason I thought.

The upshot is that everyone has three weeks to give the new ruleset on Kael Drakkel a try for free but after that, and if they want to stay longer, they'll need an All Access membership. So, is it worth getting one?

Only you can decide, although I'd obviously not suggest it was ever going to be worth subscribing just to play one of the four available titles on a special rules server. All Access is a great deal anyway, though.

I'm in the happy position of being a Member already, so I don't have to choose. Based on my brief experiences this morning, I don't think I'll be making Kael Drakkel my new Norrathian home but I imagine I'll be dropping in from time to time, which is exactly what Darkpaw want to hear.

The announcement I linked above goes a long way towards clarifying what Darkpaw are expecting from the rule changes. They want it to be a server anyone (I guess I should say "any All Access Member".) can hop onto at whim, mess around for a while, then leave. It's the sort of place you can imagine someone killing half an hour before the raid starts or spending a couple of hours while their home server is down for maintenance.

As Darkpaw describe it 

"We want Kael Drakkel to be your home away from home, especially when you just want to enjoy the game without all the pressure and extra time required. Think of Kael Drakkel as “plug and play”—get in and have immediate fun. Whether you make the server your home or a place to go when you just want some quick entertainment, all are welcome!"

It reminds me slightly of when ArenaNet added Edge of the Mists to Guild Wars 2 so players in the overflow for World vs World would have something to do while they waited. That worked for a while but eventually EotM turned into a ghost zone, when ANet switched off the xp faucet.

The big inducement to play on Kael Drakkel are the things you can get there for your "real" character. I don't think even Darkpaw are imagining many players setting up to play full-time on the Legend and Lore server. The secondary attraction is the ability to solo a lot of stuff you couldn't handle on a Live server.

I took a brief look at both of those this morning. I came away quite impressed with the goodies on offer, less so with the whole soloing a raid thing.

Nimgimli commented on yesterday's post that the idea of Kael Drakkel sounded attractive enough but the plethora of skills and abilities you'd need to learn at Level 90 was offputting. I replied, somewhat glibly asserting that solo content in EQII is already so easy that knowing what your skills do is a luxury more than a requirement.

Having died four times in a row to the first raid boss I tried this morning, I'm now willing to say that may not be strictly true on the new Kael Drakkel. It wasn't even a recent raid boss, either. It was one from way back near the start of the game. By the fourth try I could see victory was definitely within my reach but it would have taken more concentration and better playing skill than I was willing to muster just for the experiment.

On the other hand, outside the raid zone there was a yellow-con, Heroic named mob that I was able to one-shot, which seemed a tad extreme in the opposite direction. I came across a couple of bugs, too, so it's not impossible things aren't working as planned just yet. I'll keep an eye on the forums to see how many complaints there are.

As for the rewards, I spent some time looking at what Lore and Legend Merchant Ronald Gleneed had to offer and came away quite impressed. Some of it is unique to the revamped server and some comes from time-expired events, presumably making it otherwise unavailable. 

There's a ton of housing stuff, a lot of which I'd like to own. There are several mounts, at least one of which I'd use for looks. Even the new appearance armor, which didn't look all that impressive in the screenshots, is pretty spiffy when you see it in game. There was a constant stream of players coming to check it out, too, which is encouraging, especially seeing it was the middle of the night in the U.S.

The currency used to buy all of it comes from doing Achievements, that being the way Kael Drakkel operates. As far as I can tell, they're just the same, regular Achievements you can do on any server, only on Kael Drakkel you get paid for them. I somehow have over three hundred Lore and Legend Tokens already, enough to buy quite a lot of the stuff that interests me, although if I buy the Arcanists Hover Platform, it'll about clean me out.

That just leaves the scaling adornments, about which I can tell you... nothing. Didn't see 'em. Looked for 'em, couldn't find 'em. If I find out where you get them, I'll add a note to the end of this post.

And here it is. 

(The end of the post, that is. Not the note. I'm still looking.)

Meet The Krewe

Last week I bought four new games so it was a racing certainty I'd end up downloading something else for free and playing that instead. This is why I so rarely pay money for anything - games, music, books, movies, tv shows - the very act of handing over the cash seems to guarantee the universe will feel duty-bound to let me know I could have had something just as good - or even better - for nothing.

In this case, the something in question turned out to be so peculiarly unlikely, I don't think there's any way I could have anticipated it. I was checking Feedly, as I do many times a day, being as addicted, in my fashion, to certain, relatively obscure forms of social media as any GenZer to their TikTok feed, when this popped up.

Artifact Krewe, available on itch.io for the extremely appealing price of no money at all, is "a Guild Wars 2 fangame, not associated with it". Wrap your head around that, if you can. It's also "a treasure hunt game taking place in a colorful world". Now you know that, you know pretty much everything the game's storefront has to tell you, other than the developer's name - Skrool.  

Skrool seems to have made just this one game. The only link on the "About" page goes to a Twitter account going by the name of "Not Really Skrool" that's been "temporarily restricted... because there has been some unusual activity from this account.

It seems that being restricted by Twitter doesn't actually stop people seeing what you've got to say; it just means anyone who wants to find out what that is has to click the equivalent of a "proceed at your own risk" warning. I clicked, so now I can tell you that Skrool "exists". And that's about all I got from Skrool's profile.

A scan of the recent timeline reveals that Skrool has been working on the game "these last years" and... er... that's about it. Diligent research on my part (I clicked on the link to Skrool's Tumblr, perhaps significantly named It's Really Skrool, although perhaps not, since there's another Tumblr just called Skrool) reveals that the game has actually taken two years to complete. 

Having had work in the Peacemaker Calendar of 1335AE, Skrool would appear to be very active in the creative side of GW2 fandom, an aspect of the game I've been aware of for a long time but rarely felt the need to pay much attention uintil now. On the evidence presented, Asurans and their culture would seem to be Skrool's main focus.

That's something I'm sure everyone reading this who's ever played GW2 must have worked out for themselves already, just from the name of the game. According to the GW2 wiki, "krewe", with that idiosyncratic spelling, refers to Asuran "work gangs or limited single task corporate entities" although the word itself has clearly been borrowed from the carnival traditions of Louisiana and nearby regions, where it refers to "a social organization that stages parades and/or balls for the Carnival season".

Whatever its provenance, Artifact Krewe is a fine divertissement. After reading about it on MassivelyOP, I immediately downloaded the game, which arrives in a neat zip file that unpacks to take up just over a gigabyte of hard drive space. For that, you get a lush, vibrant, colorful world in which to enjoy some very gentle, relaxing and curiously satisfying gameplay.

There's no character creation beyond giving your Asura a name. Pick something you don't mind seeing repeatedly because every NPC will use it as extensively while talking to you, as if they'd just come back from a weekend's residential marketing course. 

If the game has a weak point - and it's hardly even that - it would be the dialog, which often reads as though it's been written by someone for whom English is not a first language. Coming of the back of Noah's Heart, however, that feels like a churlish observation to make. Both the meaning and tone are always eminently clear, which puts the text well above many other supposedly professional games I've played lately.

Other than that, I really can't fault it. As well as looking gorgeous Artifact Krewe sounds charming and plays smoothly. I found the controls intuitive and comfortable. It was easy to work out what to do and how to do it. Movement feels fluid and expressive, although the woozy sweep of the camera could induce motion sickness in the sensitive.

The mechanics of locating and unearthing artefacts, using a device whos acronym escapes me for the moment, are simple and straightforward. Rather than cluttering up your inventory, each artifact found adds itself to a list as you look for clues to lead you to the lost laboratory of the celebrated but mysterious Vixx.

In the fairly short time I had to play I found half a dozen items, some buried in the ground, others on crops of rock only accessible by way of some light, GW2 vista style platforming. There was one that turned out to be concealed behind a locked door, openable only by rolling a large rock onto a pressure plate. The puzzles felt like fun. Nothing was difficult or annoying. 

"Fun" pretty much sums up what I've seen of the game so far. The whole experience is sun-drenched, celebratory and bright. It may be that the tasks and challenges get harder, later but somehow I doubt it. There's no combat in the game and it feels very much modeled on those whimsical, joyous, almost childlike events GW2 was known for in its earliest days. 

For someone who remembers the game as it was back then, it doesn't feel so much like a tribute as a reminder of what could have been. Right now, I'd rather play Artifact Krewe than log in to the game that inspired it.

Has Anybody Seen My Invisible Plane?

 

DCUO is very much a drop-in game for me these days . Not that it ever was anything much more but there was a time when I did at least make new characters and level up in open world content once in a while.

Now just about all I do is log in to claim my freebies, clear the clutter that inevitably creates, then visit my Lair to put up the pick of the new posters and pets. If there are any nice style choices I might also play around with those for a few minutes before logging out and forgetting about the game until next time.

There are any number of mmorpgs where I could be doing the same but as the posting history on this blog amply demonstrates, after a brief infatuation my loyalty tends to fade. Time between visits gets longer, the visits themselves get shorter. Eventually everything folds neatly away into the forgotten stack at the back of my mind, to resurface, if at all, only as a footnote, brought out to shed light on some new infatuation as the cycle begins again.

While we're on the topic of new mmorpgs, there do seem to be a lot of them this year. Almost a glut. So many, indeed, I think this may be the first time I can remember not having time to sample them all, even to get a few posts out of the experience. 

I mentioned Gloria Victis recently, which admitedly is new only to me, not the genre, but there's also Elyon, which launched on Steam this week and today I got an email from NCSoft inviting me to the closed beta for Lineage2M. Not a very exclusive invite since you can sign up on the website but I'm not bothered. I don't have time to try it right now, anyway.

Amongst all this competition DCUO keeps itself, if not at the forefront of my thoughts then at least somewhere I can see it, by dint of two things: an emotional connection to my lifelong history with DC Comics and the pragmatic fact that it's part of Daybreak Games' All Access membership plan. That the stuff  Dimensional Ink gives away for free can often be really good doesn't hurt, either.

Just knowing I'm notionally paying for premium access wouldn't be enough. Planetside 2 is also included but I never log in to that one. I've tried it and it doesn't really do anything for me. It's unlikely anything they could offer in the way of pets or costumes or housing (not that I believe PS2 has any of those things, currently) would be likely to change my mind, either.

Conversely, even though EverQuest does have housing and pets and costume gear (of a kind), the nature of the game and especially its elderly appearance make those kind of incentives considerably less of an inducement. For EQ, the draw is the meat not the sauce (Weird metaphor from a vegetarian...) I keep coming back for the content and the gameplay, not the fluff.

Really, though, I pay my All Access subscription for EverQuest II. That's where the membership benefits really make a big difference. For the rest, all the games are Free to Play anyway and I actually play EverQuest on a free account most of the time, not on my AA. And when it comes to those attractive freebies in DCUO, Dimensional Ink are very generous about handing them out to all players, not just the paying members. 

This month it's all about Wonder Woman. Even as a lifelong fan of the DC extended universe (That should really be universes or better yet multiverses.) I can't pretend Diana Prince has been central to my affection for the franchise over the years. 

I own many thousands of DC comic books but I'd be surprised if more than twenty or thirty are Wonder Woman titles. I do have something of a soft spot for the Mike Sekowsky era "Mod" Wonder Woman, when she fought crime in a bell-bottomed jumpsuit. 

She was always there in the Justice League's classic line-up, of course, twirling her golden lasso to get the truth out of some super-villain or ferrying the non-flyers to the fight in her invisble plane. Ah, the invisible plane. I hear it makes an appearance in the second movie, which I have yet to see. If an invisible plane can make an appearance, that is. Bit of a koan, that, eh?

I have one, you know. An invisible plane. I got it this morning. It's one of those freebies I mentioned. The only one you have to be an All Access member to claim. I thought it was going to be a house item so after I claimed it I went to my Lair and tried to place it but it was nowhere to be seen. Yes, thank you. I get the irony.

Turns out it's not a house pet but an "Accessory", which seems to be what DCUO calls vanity pets. I had to go look it up. I also had to look up how to apply the "Chroma" I'd just been given, too. I had no idea how to do that although it appears I've done it before. 

There are far more things in DCUO I don't understand than things I do. I may have been "playing" since beta but there's playing and playing, isn't there? I've been playing at playing at best.

Another thing I don't know how to do, as I've explained before, is how to have more than one Base. Or Lair. Or Hideout. They're all the same thing except they're not. 

I did some more reading on that today and I think I have the hang of it now. "Base" is the generic term for "Housing" and "Lair" and "Hideout" are sub-types. A Lair is bigger than a Hideout and a Lair can have practical advantages a Hideout can't. Just don't ask me what they are.

The reason I was thinking about it was that there was a free Hideout in my Claims. Nothing to do with Wonder Woman as far as I know. She definitely doesn't have a space home in any of the comics I ever read. I haven't been able to check it out yet because although I've worked out how to swap bases now, if I swap from a larger one to a smaller one I'll lose most of my placements and I have everything set up how I like it.

The Space Base was one of many freebies from another event, one I'd completely missed, the 2021 charity livestream for Extra Life. I think it might still be going on. The web page says "The next stream is on Friday at 23:00 BST", by which time I hope to be asleep, since I'm working tomorrow and I have to be up around 6 am. 

The Space Base came from there, anyway, along with a load of other goodies like more Chroma color skins and a whole load of postcards. I do like the postcards but I'm running out of room to display them.

There's a really striking poster included in the Wonder Woman collection. It's the 80th anniversary of the creation of the character we're celebrating, by the way and she's probably more popular now than she's ever been. The power of these archetypal characters is astonishing. It's hard to imagine them ever fading.

It took me a few minutes to find a spot for the larger of the two posters and even then it wasn't ideal. I might have to move a few things around because it's too good to hide halfway down the stairwell on the way to the basement. Maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and pay for a second base.

I'm just rambling now. I'll stop. Oh, except to mention the Wonder Woman Chroma skin is really nice but I wish it didn't include my character's hair. That's just weird. 

Or maybe I just don't know how to use it. Seems likely.

Unmemory: It's Pussy Riot Meets The Spice Girls

I love getting free games. I'm not that great at remembering to collect them. I went to the trouble of installing the Epic Games launcher well over a year ago but months go by without me thinking to click on the desktop icon to see what's waiting there.

I'm better with Steam but only because there's a banner across the front page. If it wasn't for that I'd never pick up any of their freebies. I won't make a Microsoft account so I missed out on all those XBox-on-PC titles when Bill Gates was handing them out. Does Bill still work there? He never writes, he never calls...

About the only place I routinely, reliably remember to pick up my allotment of free games is Amazon Prime. I'm not sure why that is. I think it might be because when Amazon acquired Twitch and started giving games away it seemed like a big deal, somehow. I felt I should make the effort. Also, they did it exactly on the first of the month, every month, which made it very easy to remember.

Then they transitioned from Twitch to Prime and now I get emails from Amazon reminding me I have games I could be playing for free under my sub. They still add new games on the first of the month and generally they remove them when the month ends but some hang around for a little longer so there's not so much pressure. 

When it says "playing" it means "taking screenshots".

Naturally, now things have become more flexible and customer-friendly I forget to claim my games more often. Or, I should say, I forget to claim them on time. To date I haven't actually forgotten altogether. 

A whole month never goes by without I open my Prime Games launcher to sift through the freebies, see if there's anything I might want to play.

It's an interesting aspect of the whole "give games away" thing. The companies don't just give the games away. You have to ask for them. 

The way it works with Prime is, when you log into your account, you see all the titles priced at "£0 with Prime" just sitting there next to a big, blue button that says Claim. Press that button and £0 changes to a green circle with a tick next to the word Claimed. You now "own" that game in the same way you own any games you actually gave Amazon money for, which is the same as saying you don't own them at all.

You can, however, play them at will for as long as Amazon offers the service, which these days is about as close to owning a game as any of us is going to come. There's one more layer of ownership to go through before you can finally play the games, of course. You have to install them.

It's quite a long process when you look at it, isn't it? The games may be free but you have to be quite determined to walk away with them. It's not like the login freebies in some free-to-play mmorpgs I could name, where your bags fill up with stuff the second you load into the gameworld whether you want them to or not. I guess someone learned something from that U2 free album debacle after all.

Much though I like to get something for nothing, I've learned over time to consider the cost. Free does not always mean free. 

Pass. Next?

In the case of games, the main expense is time and space. I have three hard drives in my PC, giving me four gigabytes of onboard storage. I've filled up more than three-quarters of it. I don't see any benefit to me in storing games on my hardware that I'm never going to play but equally I don't want to miss out on "owning" games I might want to play some day, just not yet.

That means triaging the offer. This used to be a relatively awkward process that often involved me typing the names of the games into Google and tracking down reviews. Amazon have made it a lot easier by including brief descriptions of every title plus links to the publisher's website and trailers on YouTube.

Often I can see immediately from the base description that I wouldn't be interested. Other times the opposite applies. For edge cases I click the links and try to learn enough to make an informed decision. Since it's ultimately going to cost me nothing but this time I've already spent, I tend to err on the side of "It's free! Gimme!".

Chekhov needn't fret.

That's why I currently have fifty-three games on my Prime account marked as "Claimed" but not yet "Installed". To be fair to myself, seven of those games were once installed. Three of them I played, enjoyed and finished and the rest I played and didn't like. I uninstalled all seven of them but, logically as I now realize, uninstalling just sets the games back to "Claimed" status and there they sit, waiting to be re-installed at some future time.

Some months there's almost nothing in the free pot that I want to pull out. Other times there can be a lot. September, the pot was full. There were six new titles up and four of them were Adventure games of one kind or another.

Of those four, The Secret Files: Puritas Cordis is the follow-up to a game I already own but haven't yet played. Sam and Max Hit The Road is a supposed classic I'd read a full playthrough of in one of Syp's retro-gaming series. Both of those were Point & Click Adventures, probably my favorite genre after mmorpgs.

Puzzle Agent was more of a long shot, being a "Casual Puzzle Adventure". It's a Telltale game, though, and while I don't think I've ever played one of theirs, I have heard good things about them. 

I claimed those three and then I looked at the fourth, the clumsily-named Unmemory. Despte that flat-footed title it seemed like it might be the most interesting of all. Also, by a very wide margin, the most pretentious, always a selling point with me but maybe not for everyone. Judge for yourself from Amazon's description.

"Game"? Seriously? What, like pheasant?

I thought it sounded interesting, at least, so I claimed it, installed it and over the next few evenings I played it. Or read it. Or solved it. I did something with it, I know that much.

There are a few glowing reviews of the game online. It does have its moments and overall I enjoyed it but at times it can feel stilted and unsatisfying. Partly that's because the many puzzles don't always seem to be particularly well-integrated into the text. More damningly, it's because Unmemory doesn't always present that compelling a narrative. 

The setting is the 1990s, ostensibly, although I didn't find there was much sense of either time or place. The game has a fogged, dazed feel to it, not at all inappropriate given the confused mental state of the protagonist, who has one of those handy cases of literary amnesia that means he can't remember anything that gets in the way of the plot.

The voice acting is quite flat but not in the lack of affect flatness way that appeals to me, more like an early table-read that somehow ended up being recorded and used even though none of the actors had really nailed any of the characterizations yet. The puzzles are mostly very similar, involving the opening of numerous locked boxes by way of increasingly abstruse and artificial clues involving numbers and symbols. I generally found them logical and fair but too often I didn't find them all that interesting. That might be because there are just too many.

The game is structured like a novel. It comes in eight chapters and there's a lot of reading. The prose style isn't bad, a kind of art-noir that mostly trips along. I've read a lot worse in published genre paperbacks.

I'd read that.

By far the most innovative and successful aspects of the enterprise are the many and manifold tricks and glitches in the way the text and illustrations move and shift and change as you read. There are words you can click on that open other passages of text. Sometimes those are obvious, sometimes less so. As you scroll the page things out of sight can change so that when you scroll back other passages reveal themselves. Text is redacted and then revealed according to whether you've set a particular piece of music playing by starting a jukebox or turning on a radio.

All of this works really well. It feels natural and it adds layers of nuance to the reading experience.
Whoever coded this part is really on to something. This is the sort of thing I was imagining writers would do with digital technology a decade ago, when eReaders were supposed to be killing the printed novel, only few of them seem to have been interested (or skilled enough) to try. 

I would very definitely like to read an actual eBook using these mechanics. It would need to tell a more engaging story to hold the attention past the novelty value, though. Unmemory's storyline is comic-book in the pejorative meaning of the phrase. The characters are so one-dimensional they can literally be diferrentiated best by the different colored balaclavas they wear. 

The plot is supposed to be smoky and tangled but for a whodunnit to work you need to care who done it. I didn't. I could barely remember who the options were. When the final twist appears it's so unsatisfying it lands exactly right, strangely enough. The ultimate kiss-off to the reader. You cared about this stuff? More fool you, then.

The experimental nature of the project extends beyond the ending, not that I'd have known had I not
needed to resort to a walkthrough for the later chapters, largely out of boredom with the never-ending sequence of box-opening puzzles and their comprehensible but tedious solutions. I do have to own up to getting stuck at least twice on puzzles that were fair and solveable. There isn't much in the game that I'd call unreasonable. Just some that isn't a lot of fun.

No, she won't.

Although I'd finished the game and seen the credits roll I noticed the walkthrough had another page to go. I read that and found you can use an email address in the game to enter into real-world correspondence with someone that can lead to other revelations and explanations. It's a nice metatextual touch but once again you'd need to care about these characters and this plot more than I did to make the effort.

One thing I noticed that the walkthrough writer didn't was a name in the long list of major Kickstarter donors that scrolls down the screen after the game ends: Jason Epstein. Hmm. Could it be that Jason Epstein? 

If so, it's evidence that he does like games. It was always a pet theory of mine that he bought the SOE portfolio, or got himself involved in its purchase at least, not becuase he wanted to make a fortune out of it or for any of the more nefarious reasons that have been suggested by some, but because, like Curt Schilling, he was a rich gamer who wanted a game company to play with.

I have absolutely no evidence for the theory except that it's nicely romantic, something I certainly wouldn't say about Unmemory. It's a fairly bleak, cynical lope through a sketchy 90s underworld that mostly exists in the minds of advertising copywriters and media studies graduates. For all that, it's an unusual and curious game, worth playing just to see what could be done with the form but mostly isn't going to be.

Climb Higher

 

I spent an hour this afternoon playing two free games I found on Steam. I say "playing". I might be stretching a point.

The first was Cloud Climber. It's from Two Star Games and it only appeared on Steam a couple of weeks ago. Someone must have been waiting for it. It already has a "Very Positive" rating from nearly fourteen hundred reviews.

That could be because the developer's previous game, My Friend Is A Raven, has been available on Itch.io for a while, long enough to pick up some (Over-enthusiastic) reviews and a whole bunch of video walkthroughs on YouTube. 

 

I played MFIAR (as no-one is calling it) after I finished Cloud Climber. It's one of those multiple-ending games that seem to have become something of a talking point around here of late. 

It could almost be an exemplar of the genre. Its endings are so central to the design they aren't only named, they're numbered. My first playthrough took me less than ten minutes and I got the bad ending. I know it was the bad ending because... well, see for yourself.

 

It seemed quite plain to me that the idea here must be to see all the endings. When it's made as clear as that my issues with the general concept don't seem entirely relevant. Also, it was pretty obvious how to get to see the rest.

Well, two of them. I skipped through the same steps with slight variations a couple more times for those. It only took two or three minutes each time. It would have been rude not to.

I couldn't figure out the one ending I was missing, though. I thought I'd rung all the changes. There are only a very few ways to twist a tale with so few moving parts. In the end it turned out I needed to do less, not more. That fixed it. But I had to watch YouTube. I didn't figure it out on my own.

 

So that's My Friend Is A Raven. I realize I haven't actually described it in any way but why bother? It's free and it takes ten minutes to play. If you're interested, go try it. It's no life-changing experience but it's worth ten minutes of anyone's time.

More unusual and possibly more intriguing is the game that led me there, Cloud Climber. This one really does push the boundaries of what could reasonably be called a game. The description on Steam calls it "a short narrative adventure game". Well, it is short. I won't argue with that.

 

Gameplay consists of climbing ladders and opening doors. A couple of times there are keys to pick up because a couple of doors are locked, even though there seems no reason they should be. There's one interaction with a fixed object and twice you need to collect some planks and repair something but again doing so doesn't seem to serve any function whatever except to justify calling it a game.

As for narrative, there are diary pages lying around and the protagonist soliloquizes now and again in voiceover. The sum total of the storyline could be jotted down in a paragraph. A short paragraph.

 

The minimalistic approach is highly effective. It doesn't really need anything more. The whole thing isn't so much a game as a mood piece, a tone poem even. 

It takes place atop a series of wooden towers high enough to reach the clouds, which is precisely what they were built to do. Visually, it's breathtaking. Literally, I imagine, if you have any kind of a fear of heights.

I'm not sure whether it's possible to fall off the stairs or platforms. One of the diary pages does allude to the possibilty. I was very careful not to find out. It certainly feels like it could happen at any moment, though.

 

The soundscape is understated and evocative. There's a disorienting sense of isolation and loneliness. The ending (there's only the one this time... I think) comes laced with bittersweet confusion. The developer (it's just one person, Gavin Eisenbeisz) calls Cloud Climber "a really relaxing experience" and I guess it is, at that. Provided you don't think about it too hard. Or have acrophobia. Or abandonment issues.

Once again I won't go on at length. Cloud Climber took me about fifteen minutes and the screenshots pretty much tell the story. It's free, go play it.

There's a third project in the works from the same studio, something that does indeed look much more like a game. It's called My Beautiful Paper Smile and it's already available in Early Access. It's a cheery little fable about "a world where children are raised in large facilities, and taught to smile at all times. If the kids show any emotion other than happiness they are deemed imperfect, and are heavily punished". Just the kind of thing we all need right now, I'm sure you'll agree.

Might give that one a miss, at least for the time being. Not sure I'm really quite in the mood.

Dancing By The pool

Here's a little thing I forgot about World of Warcraft's free trial (aka Starter Edition): if you don't pay, you don't get to use the mail.

In a game with no shared bank facilities, where the normal means of passing items from one character to another on the same account is by posting them, that seems a little harsh. You'd have thought they might restrict mail to just your own characters. What harm could that do?

I found out the hard way when I logged my new Vulpera Hunter into Orgrimmar last night. Attentive readers may remember I'd prepped for the cancellation of my subscription by making several new characters and sending them thirty-slot bags and pocket money. 

It wasn't until I went to open my inventory that I remembered something. When I'd made the new fox I'd sent her the stuff but she'd never gotten around to taking it out of the mailbox. And now she can't. Bummer.

That was why I ended up playing my new Goblin Warlock instead. It was touch and go whether she'd have bags and gold either. I remembered that I had logged her in but I also recalled running around Kezan for so long, searching without success for the bank, that I'd given up and logged her out back where she'd started. 

I thought I'd better check whether she was in the same predicament. Luckily it turned out she'd at least collected her mail before leaving. Since she was out I thought I might as well play her. 

So I did. And it was fun. A lot of fun. Back in 2013 I described the Goblin starting zone as "a fascinating place... genuinely laugh-out-loud funny" and I see no reason to alter my opinion. I'm not absolutely sure I've played through all of WoW's starting zones but of all the ones I can remember Kezan is by far the most entertaining. 

In that post I also wrote "had I known I was going to be expelled from it so abruptly and terminally at around level five I would have taken a lot more trouble to explore it in depth", something I found myself thinking again last night. I did manage to spend a little more time poking around under the elevated highways, down in the slums where the poor folk live but I still think I need to make another goblin and go poke around some more. 

Here's the thing about WoW. It applies to a lot of mmorpgs, come to think of it. A huge amount of work goes into the starting zones and the character, personality and culture of the races that live in them. And then most of that work is just thrown away.

About the only races that seem to retain some measure of consistency are the ones designed as comic relief. Gnomes, goblins and talking rats, usually. (The Asura in Guild Wars 2 are a bizarre hybrid of all three). They're the short ones who speak funny and make ridiculous machines that frequently blow up in their faces. That seems to be a joke that never grows old for developers. 

All the other races, no matter how different they start out, tend to clump up into one heroic (or villainous) blur as they diasporate around the world. (Yeah, that's not a word. Just go with it).

I'd very happily play a version of WoW that focused most of its attention on the goblins and their culture. It's plain to see from the brief time we get to spend in Kezan that there would be no shortage of material. There's enough conniving and backstabbing and plotting to fill dozens of storylines. You don't need external threats with a culture like theirs. 

Except this is heroic fantasy so the external threat to end all external threats turns up before you make level five. Nothing like a dragon attack to put some fire under you. Then a volcano goes off and the island sinks so that's the end of that.

It's all go but I'm not sure any of it tops the quest where you cruise around town in a convertible, picking up your crew to go party. Seriously, that's the game I want to play. I want to get to know my guys, hear their back stories, blag our way into parties and onto private yachts, make it on the scene. 

In the short time before the volcano erupted I got to drive a car, win a footbomb match, dance by the pool and get dressed up fit for a red carpet premiere. Not to mention rob a bank and blow up my own house. Nothing's going to match that. It's all downhill from there. 

I ended up comatose on a raft with nothing left but my good name. In a place that eerily reminded me of the new starting zone, Exile's Reach. Remember that first quest there, where the Murlocs have stolen a bunch of stuff and you have to go get it back? Well this is like that, only instead of Murlocs, it's monkeys.

Levels zip by all too fast in the free lane. My goblin was already level seven when I left her, sitting at the top of some stairs, staring out across the waves to where her homeland used to be. She'll be level ten by the time she gets to Orgrimmar and her life will be half-way over. 

I just hope she can find the bank.

Cruel Garrison

Time for a very quick update on what I've been up to in World of Warcraft. Dithering, mostly. My monthly subscription falls due in five days and I haven't yet decided whether to cancel. 

I re-subbed back in October with the intention of checking out the Shadowlands pre-patch, the level squish, Chromie Time and the new tutorial zone, Exile's Reach. I did all of those, wrote a bunch of posts about it and generally had a pretty good time. 

The plan had also been to open up access to the Vulpera allied race, make a fox and level that character to the cap but what with one thing and another I ended up levelling a goblin shaman first, all the way from character creation to the pre-Shadowlands level cap of fifty, something I definitely hadn't expected to find myself doing. After that I didn't quite have the determination to push the fox to fifty, mostly because the EverQuest II expansion arrived when she was about ten levels shy.

When Reign of Shadows appeared in early December I didn't stop playing WoW altogether but my hours dropped to a bare minimum. I was still logging in but almost entirely to keep my ricketty garrison working on hexweave bags. 

 

Even so, that took more time than I expected. I'd imagined it would be like EverQuest's Overseer, just a few clicks on the UI each day, but it seems Blizzard intended something a lot more hands-on. Making bags required me to keep my tailor supplied with sumptuous furs, while upgrading just the few buildings I needed to get the operation up and running cost gold I didn't have. 

I found myself out hunting wolves and cat-people for their fur for an hour or so almost every other day and making repeated forays into old raid instances to make money. For the last two months I've played WoW every day and while I've been there, that's all I've done. 

At first it was fun. Then it became a habit. Now it's starting to feel like a chore. I guess it's the WoD experience in microcosm. And I'm beginning to realize it's also all been a bit... pointless.

First I noticed that hexweave bags can reliably be bought for between 250g and 300g on my server. Using my garrison I can make a bag every other day or so for free but I can make enough gold to buy three or four bags in just the time it would take me to gather the fur. 

It's more satisfying to make them, in theory, but that satisfaction wears off after the first half-dozen or so. I'm at the point now where I feel I might as well just do a bunch of old raids once a week and buy my bags.

 

More significantly, I realized eventually that having an Alliance character with a garrison isn't going to help my Horde characters with their inventory issues. Blizzard take their faction split a lot more seriously than most other developers. Since one of the main reasons I was doing this in the first place was to put thirty slot bags on my Vulpera hunter I clearly didn't think it through.

Of course, I have Horde characters who could build garrisons of their own. And that sounded like a fairly attractive option until I realized something else. Garrisons are unique to the character that quests for them, not the account or even the faction on that account. 

Since my end-game here is to be capable of supplying big bags on demand to any new characters I make and play under the free-to-play rules after I cancel my subscription, what I should have done was send one Alliance and one Horde character, under level twenty, to start a garrison and then be very careful not to let them level too far to be able to keep using it. 

I'd already confirmed on my other free account that you don't need to subscribe to have a garrison and that under the new levelling rules you can get the quest at level ten. Today I spent half an hour getting my level fifteen druid from Stormwind to Shadowmoon Valley just to make absolutely sure she couldn't use the garrison I already had. I've found that no matter what online guides tell you about WoW you never really know for sure until you test it in game.

 

This time I could have saved myself the swim. She couldn't even see the damn thing. It exists in some other plane of reality, apparently. I spent the next half hour porting back to talk to Chromie then heading back to Shadowmoon to get the necessary quests.

That was just for proof of concept. I'd have to do the same again with a horde character and then I'd have to level up the garrisons and the necessary buildings and keep farming the furs and I'd have to fund all of that with characters in their teens. It makes absolutely no sense and I'm not going to do it.

A better plan might be to use the remaining five days of my sub to make enough gold with my Horde and Alliance level fifty characters to buy enough hexweave bags for everyone. That would be far, far easier and an ideal project for keeping my hands busy while I listen to the second England-Sri Lanka Test Match.

That's sorted then. Grind some gold, buy some bags, cancel the sub, go back to playing for free. Only...

I've been wondering whether I ought to buy Shadowlands. I've read a lot about it and it sounds pretty good for someone who enjoys levelling. I'd probably get a month or two's solid entertainment out of it and it's looking likely I'll be at home for about that long before I get the call to go back to work.

So, I'm dithering, as I said. Shadowlands is tempting but I haven't really finished with Reign of Shadows yet. It would make more sense to concentrate on finishing one expansion before I start on another. 

Or I could just let the sub roll on for another month and decide later. That's how they get you, isn't it? 

Well, it's how they get me, anyway.

I Can Take A Hint

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Flosch pointed out in the comments, Trüberbrook was actually last month's free adventure game on Amazon Prime. Or something. It wasn't available to download any more by the time I wrote my post, anyway. 

There's an adventure game most months, or it seems like it. Good for me.Apart from rpgs (mmo or regular), adventure games are about the only video games I really enjoy.

This month's free adventure game on Prime is The Inner World, also available for £11.99 on Steam, although since you could sub to Prime for £7.99 and then cancel you'd have to be pretty crazy to pay that much. Except, oh no, wait, that won't work... it was free, but only until 11 September! So now you do have to pay for it after all.

We've all been there, right?

 

 

Seriously, are they trying to make it difficult? It used to be so simple. Just four or five games each month, for a month. Now look at this list for September, courtesy of Gamespot. 

If you parse that, (thirty-two games in all) you can see the original five free games per month are still there, available all month and only this month. Then there's some obvious tie-in with SNK, whoever they are, where you can get what's probably ever game they ever made (twenty-two of them and not one I'd take for free) any time from the start of September through 'til the end of March next year.

Finally, and crucially, there are four "bonus games", all of which you can have for nothing from the beginning of the month, only each of them drops out, week by week in turn throughout September, until the last one's gone by 2 October. Most of those same "bonus games" were also bonuses in August, as was Trüberbrook, which doesn't even appear on Gamespot's September list, even though I installed it on 4 September. Then again, maybe I confirmed it in Augusrt and didn't get around to downloading it until later...

I 'm going to have to do a whole lot more fact-checking before I post about these things in future. Recommending something that's free is one thing but £11.99 is very much another and £24.99, which is what Trüberbrook is currently going for on Steam, is something else again.

I'm not sure that's technically accurate.

Those are not unreasonable prices by any means but I wouldn't pay them. I'm only playing both games because they come free with a service I already pay for and use. Then, I'm really enjoying both of them, so does that make sense? Shouldn't I be more pro-active? Seek out games like this and buy them immediately, rather than passively wait for Amazon or some other subscription service to throw them my way?

Yes, well, maybe. And maybe not. I am enjoying them but my enjoyment is qualified, significantly, by the fact I didn't have to pay for them. That has a lot to do with both of them being adventure games. It's a genre I claim to like - and I do - but it's also one I find problematic at times. Most of the time, really.

I've been playing adventure games on and off since the very early eighties. In all those years I'm not sure I've ever finished one without a walktrhrough. In the days before the worldwide web, when I bought my adventure games on cassette and played them on a ZX Spectrum, there were no walkthroughs unless maybe a magazine printed one or there was a hint sheet you could send off for, either of which might take weeks to turn up, by which time I'd be playing something else and wouldn't care any more. 

Back then, when I got stuck, and I always would, that was it. I didn't finish the game at all. I just bought another and played that until I got stuck again. And so on.

Who didn't?

It made buying adventure games an ambivalent process. I'd be excited at the prospect of a new game and for a while I'd have a really good time, problem-solving and exploring. And then I'd bog down on some puzzle I couldn't fathom and I'd get frustrated and fed up and the game would go on a shelf and never be played again. 

If I'd made it a good way through I wouldn't really mind. The stories were generally not so good you'd care whether or not you ever found out how they ended. It was always more about the process than the content. If I'd gotten stuck before I'd really got going, though, I'd feel I'd been ripped off, somehow, even though it was as likely to be my fault as the game's that I couldn't work out what I was supposed to do next.

The arrival of free, instantly available walkthroughs effectively removed the issue of buying something I'd never be able to finish but it brought with it another set of problems all its own. Once you start resorting to a walkthrough to play an adventure game you can't help but notice that what you're really doing is watching a very badly-paced movie or reading a very stilted and awkward book. 

You never think of these things until it's too late, do you?

 

For me, playing an adventure game these days is a balancing act. I try to avoid using walkthroughs as much as possible. The further I get without having to look anything up, the better I feel about the game and my experience playing it. When I get stuck I try to figure it out for myself but only up to the point where I start getting annoyed. 

At that moment I do one of two things: stop playing or consult a walkthrough. Taking a break sometimes allows my brain to reset. When I come back to the game the next day I won't necessarily slip back into the same groove. I may see something I'd missed or think about the situation from a different angle. Stopping like that is a risk, though. Sometimes I just never come back to the game at all.

Going for the walkthrough is more likely to keep me pushing on through but it, too, has risks. I try to skim-read so as to do no more than catch the hint of an idea that pushes me over whatever hump I'm caught on. Oddly, games that have actual hints built in really irritate me. Go figure.

Pretty much the whole genre right there.

If I can finish an adventure game while skipping through the walkthrough like a stone across water, I'll end up satisfied. If I find myself having to read paragraph after paragraph of instructions or, god forbid, watch a YouTube video every time the game moves to a new scene, the whole thing starts to feel pointless in the extreme. 

I played The Inner World for the first time today, for a couple of hours. There's a lot I like about it. It's visually appealing, it's well-written, it's funny and the voice acting is mostly excellent. The controls are very comfortable, too, which always helps. 

The puzzles are of the middling kind. So far most of them have what I'd call fair video-game logic. Clearly anyone who tried to do almost anything that happens in an adventure game in real life would find themselves detained for their own safety in short order but action in The Inner World does have the necessary internal consistency to make sense in context. 

So far I would estimate I've been able to solve about two thirds of the problems myself and of the remaining third I generally have the correct solution, I just haven't been able to put together all the necessary intermediate steps. Only a couple of times have I had to say "well, that would never happen!".

I'll take "Things a psychopath would say" for $500

I've had to use a walkthrough a few times but it's been interesting to see that the solutions suggested aren't necessarily the solutions I've ended up using. There seems to be plenty of flexibility in what order things can be done, which is good design.

Even though I'm well within my personal tolerance for acceptable interventions, though, using the walkthrough has made one aspect of the game even harder to ignore than it would otherwise have been: The Inner World really would work better as an animated cartoon than a game.

Or possibly a radio play or a podcast. There's an awful lot of of dialog. A big part of the gameplay is talking to characters multiple times about multiple topics. It's fun because, as I said, the writing is good and the voice acting better. What's not so great is that the majority of my time is spent either clicking to make someone say their next line or sitting back and listening to them say it.

Trüberbrook, by contrast, isn't as well-written or as funny and the voice acting isn't as good but it's a better adventure game. There's a more even balance between the watching and listening part and the gameplaying part. The difficulty of the puzzles is also pitched almost precisely in my comfort zone. I'm about halfway through now, I think, and I haven't had to use a walkthrough once. Ok, once. Just the tiniest glance that confirmed I was doing the right thing already. Hardly even counts.

I'd recommend both games. They're each strong, fun experiences. Would I pay to play them, though?

Nope. But then I don't have to, do I? 

This is the modern world. No one has to pay for fun any more.

Hot Fun In The Summertime : EQ, EQII

I had another post planned for today but since I appear to have appointed myself unpaid P.R. rep for the EverQuest franchise that's going to have to wait. This is a time-critical announcement!

In recent years, Daybreak Games have been making a big deal out of summer with a long series of special events and offers in both EQ games. In EQII the Ethereal season is already under way but yesterday saw the start of the Summer Spectacular in both games.

Now, I'm guessing this is an event that's going to run across the whole season but that's speculation on my part because so far all we have is the schedule for the first week, July 1 to July 8. Let's bow to seniority and start with EverQuest.

The headline feature here is a 76% boost to all XP, faction and "rare drop rewards". Why 76%? July 4th maybe? For years and years bonus xp always came in round numbers, usually 100%. Of late it's been pegged back to 50%, which is generally not enough to get me to log in if I wasn't going to anyway, so 76% is an improvement.

The bonuses are for everyone, free to play and Members alike, "Members" being what DBG now prefer to call "Subscribers". Subscription is apparently a word we don't use in polite company any more.

While I might not log in for XP I will always make the effort for free stuff. Logging in this week will get you "two timely and celebratory familiars: the Metamorph Totem: Murikaglider and the Metamorph Totem: Cernerder'Eh Murkglider". They'll be autogranted to your Reward window as soon as you log in, provided you're a Member.

I confess I'm not exactly sure what they are. I didn't know EQ had familiars other than the ones Wizards use. Whatever they are, whatever they do, I want them! Also, Murkgliders look cool.

The Cernerder'Eh Murkglider in action.
Does Stargrace know about this?

That's about it for EQ other than some stuff returning to the cash shop. On to EQII, which gets the better deal from this event in my opinion.

For a start the bonuses, which again apply to everyone, go the full monty: "Status, Guild XP, and Currency rewards will be doubled throughout the event." Two of those are very significant features for anyone playing the game regularly and boosted XP is always attractive to anyone who fancies dropping back in for a session or three.

Members also benefit from double doubles on currency: "Members, your already-doubled membership currency bonus is doubled AGAIN during the event. This includes Ethereal currency!" With Ethereals always being a major draw, that's going to be popular.

But what about the free stuff? Don't worry, it's coming, and there's more than you might think.

The official announcement talks about a free mount, available via the DBG in-game store: "Log in and visit the Marketplace for a very special (and free!) Scorched Sky Carpet Mount. This will only be available during the event. Members only".

Even though I only saw the press release late last night, the lure of a free mount was enough to make me log in immediately. It's ironic, given that I once left the Live game to play on the much quieter Test Server for five years almost purely because the introduction of flying carpets annoyed me so much, but now I love them.

This is a particularly impressive model, too, with lanterns hanging from all four corners. The way they swing as the carpet corners is entrancing. It's a pity my Berserker's cloak clips straight through the carpet but you can't have everything.

Another thing that's not made clear, either in the announcement or in game, is whether the carpet applies once per account or once per character. I rather wanted it for my Shadowknight on the Antonia Bayle server but not at the expense of my Berserker on Skyfire, who has to have All The Things, so I asked in general chat.

EQII players can be snarky but they just love to answer questions. I got an immediate response confirming the good news: the carpet is per character.

EQII also gets a cash shop deal that doesn't  apply to EQ, which seems odd. All EQII players, F2P included, get 20% off "most Marketplace items". Members get their regular 10% discount on top, making it a great time to pick up anything you've been on the fence over as well as restocking those consumables. Can't have too many tracking scrolls.

All of that seems pretty sweet to me. Let's hope it's just the start of a long, hot Summer of free stuff and special offers. Also, Gninja confirmed in a reply to a thread on Raiding (for some reason) that the Panda will be back with his amazing pre-expansion upgrades for a third year in what will no doubt be Days of Summer 3.

Don't you just love sequels?